Ongoing empirical regional piloting of program Interdemocracy indicates a counterintuitive but theoretically significant pattern: adolescents are generally capable of exercising autonomous, first-person judgment in protected deliberative settings, while teachers acting as facilitators struggle to refrain from exerting epistemic influence — even when explicitly instructed to do so. The core issue does not lie in adolescents’ cognitive immaturity, susceptibility to peer pressure, or inability to articulate reasons. On the contrary, when procedural safeguards are in place (e.g. first-person speech, no reactions allowed), young participants demonstrate a notable capacity for more authentic belief-speaking. The primary obstacle emerges at the level of facilitation.
Facilitation challenges as a structural phenomenon
Observed deviations from deliberative principles include selective attention to preferred students, asymmetric enforcement of rules, early privileging of vocal participants, positive reinforcement of certain viewpoints, facilitating interaction and even advising by selected students before enabling autonomous expression of opinions, and subtle nudging toward convergence. These behaviors are rarely experienced by facilitators as exercises of power. Instead, they are framed — and sincerely understood — as benevolent acts of support, encouragement, and pedagogical responsibility. This pattern indicates that the problem is not a lack of training or goodwill but a deeper structural dynamic: facilitators occupy institutional roles that are intrinsically tied to epistemic authority. When placed in a deliberative context requiring epistemic restraint, these roles generate a strong pull toward influence, even when neutrality is normatively prescribed.
The role of naive realism
At the cognitive level, this dynamic is underpinned by naive realism — the implicit assumption that one’s own perceptions and interpretations correspond directly to objective reality while those of others are subjective. Within educational institutions, naive realism fuses with role-based authority to produce a powerful epistemic hierarchy: teacher-speaking is tacitly interpreted as fact-speaking, while student-speaking is classified as belief-speaking. This misclassification is not typically recognized as such by teachers themselves. Because their interpretations are experienced as reality rather than perspective, interventions feel necessary, responsible, and morally justified. Naive realism thus renders influence epistemically invisible to the influencer while making restraint feel like professional negligence.
Autopoiesis and competing systems
From a systems-theoretical perspective, these findings suggest the presence of competing autopoietic processes. Educational institutions are autopoietic systems that reproduce epistemic asymmetry through roles, expectations, and evaluation practices. Deliberative formats such as Interdemocracy introduce a competing interaction order aimed at epistemic symmetry and autonomous belief-speaking. In such encounters, individual-level autopoiesis (participants reorganizing their own meaning-making) proves relatively easy to activate, while system-level transformation proves far more resistant. The institution’s existing autopoiesis tends to reassert itself through facilitators who function as gatekeepers of meaning, often without conscious intent. This demonstrates that systems already possess a stable autopoiesis oriented toward self-preservation. Democratic or participatory autopoiesis cannot simply be layered onto existing authority structures without neutralizing or displacing the epistemic functions of those roles.
Implications
The findings point to several critical implications for democratic training and participatory governance:
- The main risk to authentic belief-speaking in deliberative settings is not participant immaturity but benevolent authority.
- Facilitation should be treated as a high-risk epistemic role requiring stronger safeguards than procedural rules or ethical intentions alone.
- Naive realism functions as a personal cognitive underpinning that enables role-defined system autopoiesis gatekeeping.
- Democratic autopoiesis is more plausibly initiated at th individual level and within protected interaction spaces than through direct institutional reform.
Take-away
In sum, the empirical evidence challenges optimistic assumptions about neutral facilitation within hierarchical institutions and highlights the need to address epistemic authority, cognitive realism, and role identity as central design variables in any attempt to institutionalize democratic belief-speaking.